StorOne update automates storage tiering for data access
StorOne Data Storage Platform uses AI and ML to automate data between tiers of flash and HDD storage without the need for custom hardware or user intervention in latest release.
StorOne's platform now automates data movement between flash storage and hard drives, enabling users to access data in colder storage tiers as though it was stored locally.
The capability, according to StorOne, should eliminate manual setup by users and ultimately save both money and storage space.
The StorOne S1 Platform's 3.9 update, available today, adds what it calls the TierOne automation capability. The update bundles additional new capabilities, including updates for the SnapOne recovery service, workflow automation, report creation and a new GUI, according to StorOne.
Organizations have heard for several years that flash hardware would solve data access and speed challenges, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia. A hybrid of storage hardware and cloud deployments remains common across organizations due to cost, business needs or the speed of hardware refresh cycles.
Software-defined storage already eliminates some of those challenges by abstracting hardware and location, but further abstraction of the hardware barriers that enable consistent performance and speed is a differentiator in the market, he said.
"As an industry, we've moved away from talking about tiering to accepting that all-flash is the way forward," Robinson said. "But if you can make the case that you can combine flash while only storing those [critical] bits of data and everything else is on low-cost [HDD] storage, that can substantially change the cost equation."
Tier drops
The prior 3.8 release of the S1 platform, released last summer, already offered TierOne the capability to move data between warmer and colder hardware tiers, but it required customers to intervene and configure it manually, said Norman St. Pierre, vice president of field engineering at StorOne.
The TierOne capability isn't intended for tiering data for data management, like metadata or data lakehouses supported by companies such as Komprise, CloudSoda or Starfish Storage, St. Pierre said.
This capability instead focuses on storage availability and performance, regardless of the underlying hardware. The platform supports block, file and object protocols on any storage hardware, as well as public or private clouds.
"[Those companies are] not thinking about storage-level tiering," St. Pierre said. "[Our tiering is] traditional storage tiering, compared to orchestration tools."
TierOne automatically adjusts the size of the flash tier to scale up or down as needed for workloads, while still reading directly from lower, colder tiers when possible, St. Pierre said. The software will also move data between tiers during downtime.
The software moves specific blocks of data, rather than entire volumes, between tiers to maintain performances, according to St. Pierre.
It's forcing companies to re-evaluate if all flash is the panacea for everything.
Simon RobinsonAnalyst, Omdia
The rise of software-defined storage platforms over the past several years, which include open source projects like Ceph or commercial offerings like StorPool and StorOne, has shifted storage management further into abstraction and away from the hardware, Robinson said.
Vendors that had previously sold hardware with their software, such as StorOne, now focus purely on this software abstraction, Robinson said. This shift has given storage hardware a new lease on life and challenges the idea of all-flash adoption, but specific workloads will ultimately dictate hardware decisions, he said.
"It's forcing companies to re-evaluate if all flash is the panacea for everything," he said.
Additional features
Automation is extended to other capabilities in the 3.9 update.
Administrators can search for file-level changes within StorOne platform snaphots, according to the vendor. The platform can also detect changes to blocks during transit between storage tiers to alert admins of potential ransomware infections or detonations.
Admins also can now create automated workflow policies within the platform so users can self-service specific actions like storage volume provisioning. Organizations can also connect specific workflows with the StorOne API.
A new advanced reporting capability can automatically schedule and generate PDF reports of platform usage, ranging from generalized reports over time to specific parameters.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
